Should we start with this?
The USL History.
About 3 years ago, as my brother in law prepared to ship out to Baghdad, we discussed what he had felt was needed to give him any edge there. Having served in Gulf War I, he mentioned 2 areas that he felt he personally wanted better prep and equipment than what he went with the first go around.
1) A better personal knife. He flat didn't like the available military options and wanted a folder easily opened with one hand and closed with one hand that would stay locked in both positions. The most cost effective answer was the CRKT Blade Lock and it has served him well. Given more time, I found the Benchmade Axis Lock system knives and would probably recommend one of these now.
2. A personal illumination tool that worked, first time, every time.
After lurking on CPF for quite a while, I settled on the red Inova X5T, and the Surefire A2/Streamlight TTL2. As he is a mechanic and electrician, I presented all three and let him choose. He took the Inova and the A2. My sons own TTL2's and they have been perfect lights for juveniles. The A2 and Inova have served perfectly in Iraq, with dozens of batteries used and no lamp replacements in the A2. In addition, I sent him with a Pelican M6 with pressure switch mounted on his A4 M16, since his unit was told that not all forces could be issued weaponlights and it was all that was available before he shipped out. It has been carried extensively and has required only one bulb replacement itself.
After Ed had some experience with the A2, he became even more enthusiastic and I purchased one for myself. I've felt ever since that it is the culmination of a small incandescent light, with the bonus of long runtime, low output LED's.
The introduction of high quality lights led to the awakening of the tinkerer in me that had slumbered since I left RC racing more than a decade ago. Consequently, I began to examine the many lights available and tried to make decisions about the best options.
I soon found high output LED's, and thinking they were "IT", I purchased several LED lights, initially a MrBulk SpaceNeedleII, then an L2, then many others. Currently I have 2 SNII's, 2 SL M6LED's, a MrBulk VIP with options, a MrBulk LiOnHeart, an Inova X5T, multiple sandwich based MiniMags, and I'm waiting on an inquiry about an L4. One of my SNII's has a diffusing lens, making perhaps the most even flood light in flashlight existance.
No one could accuse me of hotwire bias at that point!
However, I noticed then, and continue to be plagued by, the obvious color problems associated with LED's. The poor color rendition of LED's under ambient light conditions leaves a lot to be desired in my view.
As such, I began exploring more incandescent options. Already in love with the perfect incandescent beam of the A2, I began attempting to step up the power, but still get that beautiful, white beam.
I ran across Wilkey's (CPF name Ginseng) experiments with the WelchAllyn lamps and then his development of the Aurora and became intrigued. We conversed, and he initially was going to bring a commercial version of the Aurora to market here on CPF, but that was aborted by his return to school to finish his doctorate.
The Aurora, the first Mega Output (3000+ lumens), incandescent in a Mag style body was, and remains, the inspiration for all of the work I have done. Wilkey had originally agreed to allow me to actually use his Aurora name, but after many changes and abandoning the MagLite host, I decided to leave the Aurora designation as the progenitor to it all and rename my version.
At that point, and after all of his research, I was reluctant to allow the project to die, but personally did not have the experience or knowledge to attempt the project myself.
With Wilkey's encouragement, I spent hours, and then days, reading about hotwires, batteries, lamps, reflectors and previous experiments. Wilkeys, Otokoyamas Perfect Mag Reflector project, Jim Sextons TigerLight mods, and many others were read and then reread as I teased out what had been tried and worked, what had been tried and didn't work, and what had been tried and then set aside for future possibilities.
I decided that in order to use the same A type cells that the Aurora used, a new body must be designed and engineered, since the boring Wilkey had used required a new end cap solution and made the body fairly thin. Two different, rough, prototypes were made, the "MULE" and the "FAT MULE", with several bodies based on the "Mule" actually being built. One of those is actively used by the machinist who built them, 2 I still own, and Wilkey has the 4th.
One of the problems that developed, however, was that the runtime of 15-20 minutes allowed the body to become incredibly hot. Hot enough to burn skin instantly, hot enough to cook eggs, hot enough to almost start fires, which the beam could already do, as I found out one day when I set the light bezel down to insert the battery. Not realizing it was on, I left it sitting while I grabbed my briefcase, only to see smoke curling up from the newspaper under the bezel! It had been sitting for less than 20 seconds, but had burned through 6 pages of newsprint.
The heat issue became a major problem, as I became more and more concerned with the ramifications of a light that could start fires with its beam and burn skin on contact! My wife, brilliant woman that she is, pointed out that in my profession I constantly rail against the burns caused by curling irons, (the number 1 cause of ER visits for burns of children in most studies) and yet I was propagating the possibility of burns from something that most people wouldn't even recognize as a danger!
That was a very sobering thought, and in combination with my two sons football season, and then my oldest son's experiences while being recruited by various college football programs, I slowed down development significantly as I attempted to reconcile the dangers and problems of heat management.
By this time I had about 300 hours of development time over 6 months, and a couple thousand dollars invested into different options, most of which were dead ends. That doesn't begin to count all the time Wilkey and others saved me by telling me about their personal experimental dead ends and problems!
So as I pondered the heat issue, two thoughts came to me and then several people asked about one of them.
What if I used a regulator of some type to shut the light off when it reached a dangerous temp, or at certain time?
I tinkered with the idea for a while, and then recognized that if I could set the timer, someone else could unset it!
That wouldn't work!
I then basically was stumped. I wanted to build the light, but I NEVER wanted to have to talk to a mother whose 2 year old daughter had grabbed the flashlight and burned her hand, or worse yet, had jumped in Daddy's lap to hug daddy and laid her face against the hot bezel and burned her face while he tried to keep it out of the way without burning himself!
And then a good friend and fellow designer, Jim Sexton, who I had talked to about using regulation as he worked on a regulated Surefire M6 pack, approached me with a brilliant idea.
Realizing that the heat idea was really cramping my design, he asked something like, "Why don't you just limit runtime by using a battery that won't allow long enough run time to cause the heat buildup in the body to become an issue?"
The problem was, that cell didn't really exist at the time I began all the MULE prototype work. A sized cells, or either 4/5A or 5/4A cells, were the smallest true high current cells available. In the meantime, though, some new cells had become available, and I had heard of them, but didn't have any experience with them yet.
And then Jim dropped the real bomb, "Why don't you build the light in a 2D Mag body?" I asked him how that would be possible and he said, "Use 11 CBP 1650 AA cells, get rid of the Mag switch core, and use a high current rocker switch like Wilkey did in the Aurora."
Eureka, the game was back on!!!
Jim volunteered to build the packs, and even design a dedicated charger if I would come up with the rest of the package. He also felt that the ring potting scheme he had employed so successfully in the TigerLight mods might be an answer here as well. He even knew of a rocker switch that might work, and found it.
The project was back on, and not just an Aurora clone, or something in a bigger body, but a completely re-engineered and re-thought light.
3000 plus lumens in a 2D sized light! A handheld sun!
Now we are 60 days later and the light is close to manufacture. The bugs are mostly worked out, at least the ones Jim and I can find, and now Modamag is working on the ones he can find!
In 2-3 weeks the field testers will have their say, and them we'll go to work to hammer these out and get them out to all the people anxiously awaiting them.
The ring potting scheme has been abandoned, in favor of a sliding can socket mount, but otherwise the USL is near fruition.
The remaining bugs with the charging system components will be worked out shortly, since we abandoned the dedicated charger idea for a time tried and proven design, but still have to find power supplies for all the worlds divergent power systems.
A larger 3" head which would allow the use of some different bulbs, is being studied by Otokoyama, and may be available at a later date.
After several episodes of engineering and then re-engineering the MULE body and it's variations, I was excited that a stock MagLite body might be used as the basis for the USL.
For those of you who haven't designed a flashlight body and tried to have it manufactured, or at least those of you who aren't product development engineers, it is a nightmare of one problem after another!
Just a few: What kind of threading, metric or standard, do you need Orings, where do the Orings go, what are the Oring tolerances, what are the Orings made of? How fine a pitch for the threads, inside or outside tailcap, standard or reverse threads, backwards compatible with a Mag? And so on and so on, ad infinitum!
People criticize Maglite for not changing their products, but after my experience, I am amazed at how well they did it in the first place, because after all these years, their product still works and has had only minimal production driven changes. That is more a testament to their front end engineering than anything else, in my view. As my southern born and bred father taught me, "If it ain't broke son, why are you trying to fix it?"
The 2D MagLite body is perhaps, along with the 3D body, the most widely sold and used light in history. Ask most people today what a flashlight looks like, and they describe a Maglite, and generally a BLACK Maglite! Older people will remember the chrome Ray-o-Vacs, but for the last decade, at least, a flashlight has become almost synonomous with a MagLite.
The 2D, with a switch almost the same size as a D cell, is a well proportioned light, but that large switch body takes up lots of "engine" room, and if we wanted to install a "Big Block" light engine, it had to go.
Once the 2D was decided on, and the switch discarded, and since we had already settled on the high current CBP AA's, we had to make sure they fit. Initially, we thought that the CBP's might just fit, since only the fat body, longer run time 2200-2500 AA's seemed to have a problem in the 4AA square configuarations. But the 1650 is a HIGH CURRENT AA and they are also a little fat. A very slight boring of the body, to the level of the threads, but not affecting them, allows a 4 square configuration.
So now we had the body and the engine. But how would we handle the power that the "big block" could put out? The Mag Switch, which uses the entire Mag body as the return path, functions reasonably well, and in fact, I had done extensive testing with it in the MULE prototypes and found that it was capable of handling the current of the high power lights, albeit at some loss due to resistance. Since it would no longer fit with the high current 11 pack of cells, though, we needed a high current, stout switch. There were 2 options. The Cherry manufactured switch used by Wilkey in the Aurora and a similar switch that Jim Sexton had located. There was no real advantage of one over the other except that the switch Jim found does have a water resistant boot which may be optional. The "ignition" switch discovered by Jim is a very nice unit rated at 16A at 125 volts. It has a very positive engagement, smooths out even more as it is used, and fits very nicely in a modified Mag body tube. For those concerned with the "square peg/round hole" look of the prototype, I believe that we have resolved that issue at this point and will have a field test unit with the new look available in the next week or so!
With the body, engine, and switch found, the development of the actual lamp portion of the light was next!
With the Body, engine, and ignition path configured, we now had to deal with the lamp/mounting portion of the light.
Wilkey (Ginseng) once again proved himself a true gentleman and stepped up to help with the choice of lamps through his in depth research. The lamps, chosen after extensive testing by Wilkey in the Aurora, and then by myself in the MULE prototypes, are high output specialty lamps produced by Osram of Germany. There is a wide selection of 12 volt lamps, of both transverse and axial filament designs that come in bipin and other configurations available from Osram and some may wish to experiment, especially with the 3 inch head.
The lamp chosen for the USL is a true 12 volt lamp which is very white at 12 volts and tolerates minimal overdrive. However, it is robust at 12 volts and I have managed to pop one only by overdriving. I have 3 lamps with more than 20 hours on each, (that's tough to do when you have only 12-20 minutes of run time on a battery pack, by the way! I connected 2 of them to a power supply and cheated a little!). I have had NO lamp failures under normal use, so I suspect that these lamps will last years under the type of use the USL will get. (Each USL will come with 2 bulbs, however.) This lamp produces 3-4000 lumens at 12 volts and is VERY slightly overdriven, so expect brightness beyond anything you have experienced in a light this size!
It is bright beyond bright, and the axial filament gives a beautiful round hot spot. Depending on which reflector is used, it has some smooth circular ringing, but it is noticable in the white wall test, but not outside.
Initially Jim and I thought that ring potting the lamps, using his ring potting scheme from the Tiger Light on a grander scale, and then placing them into customized Carley reflectors at the point of best focus would work the best.
After further testing once I had the prototype USL, though, I decided that the mounting system used in the MULE protos was simpler and more cost and time efficient. One of the recent changes which has slowed the pricing involves that adjustment.
The socket used is a high output 240 volt/20 amp ceramic socket capable of enduring the incredible heat manufactured by these lamps. It is mounted to an aluminum heat sink, mounted within the neck of the body, and will be connected thermally to the body with thermal grease.
The final pieces then are the custom ordered and designed Carley reflectors, and the heat resistant lenses from Flashlightlens.com. The Carley's will be custom ordered with appropriate neck sizing to allow passage of the stock bulb, but may have to be opened up a little if another optional bulb is used.
I do have concerns about Carley being able to deliver on time, and so the first parts ordered will be the Carleys and the batteries, which must arrive by surface ship from the Far East.
So there it is, the history and trials of the USL!!
LMAO 
